


For Us, Agin Us

by leiascully



Category: Green Wing
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-28
Updated: 2006-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-03 02:03:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Angsty Mac in a bar.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Us, Agin Us

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: post-2.08  
> A/N: Very angsty.  
> Disclaimer: _Green Wing_ and all related characters are the property of Victoria Pile and BBC4. No infringement is intended and no profit is made.

Mac spends the weekend pissed beyond imagining, both elbows on some sticky pub table and his head held up only by his fingers laced through his hair. The empty whiskey bottle stands unsteady on the grimy tabletop like some slumping monument in a neglected cemetary. He imagines he can feel the pressure of the tumor budding between his eyes, but he knows it isn't big enough yet, that it's the whiskey pounding in his head while the cancer floats in his veins. He has lived clean and right and it has not been enough.

His despair rings in the air sharp and clear like the tones an idle finger can draw from the rim of a wineglass. Everything else is blurred. He has the file on the table with the bottle, indifferent to the smears of pub grime on the manila. There is a greasy thumbprint obscuring his first name. He thinks briefly that the irony of that should be funny but the liquor burns in his throat and distracts him from laughing. Instead he wonders how long it will be until he is obscured by sod and stone. He wonders if it's possible to have his first name left off his headstone. He wonders if Caroline will visit his grave.

Caroline. He downs half the glass so that the pain in his throat balances the ache in his chest. She is uncouth sometimes, and prickly, and vulnerably big-hearted, and he loves her more than he can remember loving anyone he's known this long. She has charm without Holly's malice, and she sings the Kinks off-key when she isn't sure he's listening. He has known her twice now in the short span of months, thanks to his heroics and amnesia, and she is even more enchanting now, because he knows she loves him, and he hates Guy now and then for being there for her to comfort her in the moments when he, Mac, has let her down. There have been too many of those moments. He has not fought hard enough for her, distracted by Holly and the gaps in his memory.

He sees the change in Guy, too, the moments when he notices Guy. There is a tenderness and a hope about Guy that has never been there, and he has seen his own confusion and longing mirrored in Guy's eyes when Guy looks at Caroline. Guy will take care of her, Mac knows, which is why he called Guy and said something had come up. "Look, you love her, go to the train station, she deserves that." Guy had stammered something and Mac had shouted to keep his voice from breaking. "Just go, you wanker!" Still holding the balloon in his hand with its ridiculous message, still stunned from the death sentence with his name on it, he had hung up. He wishes he had the balloon now. He would pop it between his palms, the surgeon's hands he has spent so much time and money on. He wants to punch a wall and bruise the pale skin of his knuckles. He wants to swear a continuous inventive string of curses, words the world has never heard that will somehow encompass the vast injustice the world has dealt him. He thinks of Caroline, wistful over his glass of wine in the restaurant asking if destiny was agin them. He thinks it is.


End file.
